It's been a troubling couple of weeks for Mandriva, but I decided not to report on it since I found it hard to unravel the events leading up to all this. Now, though, the story has come to its (logical) conclusion: now that most of Mandriva's employees have been laid off, they came together and forked Mandriva. Enter Mageia.

I don't know... maybe it's just my opinion, but I think clearing a machine and starting over is actually a good thing. Cleans up garbage that's accumulated over time. If you have a separate /home partition, this is made even better; keep /home, but nuke the rest. I'm used to the Debian/Ubuntu way of package management, but I'm sure it applies to Mandriva as well: I can usually install re-install the typical programs and set up the system-wide configuration files in a tiny fraction of the time it takes to set up Windows machine. No endless updates/reboot sequence that's associated with a Windows machine.

I agree that it will take time to adjust and that the new distro will take some time to stabilize, but there are a couple of things to say about that. First, if what you have right now works and you don't need to have the latest and (supposedly) greatest versions of software, then why would you need to upgrade right away anyway? If you do want/need the latest, then yeah, you'll probably have to switch temporarily, but again--with a separate /home partition it's no big deal. And last, unless you run a business with dozens of machines to upgrade, this goes back to the first point: what's wrong with a good wipe for once?

First, if what you have right now works and you don't need to have the latest and (supposedly) greatest versions of software, then why would you need to upgrade right away anyway?

For security fixes you need something that is stable and keeps updated regularly. And it doesn't seem likely that Mandriva will be able to deliver that for long now.

And last, unless you run a business with dozens of machines to upgrade, this goes back to the first point: what's wrong with a good wipe for once?

For some it's fun to try out stuff and reinstall every now and then, but personally I'd rather just keep what's working. Linux does not really accumulate unneeded cruft so there is really no benefit to wiping it out. The only "cruft" I have is in /tmp, /var/log and whatever is left by the package manager, and I don't quite consider log-files unnecessary cruft.

So, reinstalling would benefit me...nothing. But just take time and effort.